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in reply to Terminal decline?
++. I don't agree with everything you have said, but thanks for saying it. I think there are several explanations for the reducing number of posts:
As tonto said in Re: Terminal decline?, a lot of questions have been answered. Certainly the overwhelming majority of mine have. When I wrote RFC Tutorial - Deleting Excel Rows, Columns and Sheets, I think questions on that subject were coming up about once a month. I haven't seen any recently. I don't think that's solely down to me writing one node, but still...
We are getting less spam. I think it was about 5 years ago that we were getting a dozen a day. I can live without it. Update: the stuff I remember seems to be Aug-Nov 2011, so 3.5-4 years ago, but of course it's not the only spam peak. I slouch corrected. /update
We are getting fewer trolls. I can live without them, too.
Polls are getting poorer (all the best ones have been done) and, as a result, there are fewer replies. I find most polls fun, but I can live without them, too.
There is more competition from other languages than there was 10-15 years ago. This I like. Every language has its good & bad points and I would rather see code written in the best language for the purpose. If that means that less rubbish is being written in Perl, I can live with that.
Stack overflow. In consequence of my previous point, programmers have to know more languages (although, in my limited experience, there are a lot of Java programmers who don't agree, at least yet). It seems to me that there is an increasing number of posts here that are flagged as cross-posted on SO. This I understand. If a programmer with a good reputation on other languages via SO is posting his first Perl question, he's more likely to do it where he's known than to set up a new account here for what might be one question only. I'd rather have all things Perlish under one roof, but I don't see any realistic prospect.
I disagree strongly with you that PM is deteriorating. I don't think that the quantity of recent posts is the only criterion or even a major criterion. I find the quality of SOPW posts that appear now far higher than when I first joined. Yes, there are still some shockers, but that's unavoidable. Maybe that's down to the SO effect - more of the shockers appear there and only the really interesting questions make it here. If so, I can live with that. But maybe I'm being smug.
Where I think more can and should be done is in talking outside the echo chamber. VirtualSue has been organising hack days at London Hackspace. This has drawn in one or two members of the space, who may realise that there's more to Perl than line noise. Similarly, the University of Westminster is very keen that the London Perl Workshop contain things for absolute beginners so that some of their students can come with no need for prior knowledge. Liz and Wendy have been very active in keeping a Perl presence at FOSDEM. In "Beginning Perl", Ovid advises students to create an account here. This is the sort of thing we need. If we want Perl questions asked and answered here, we need to tell all these people about this site. Otherwise, they are likely to go to SO, and I for one won't blame them.
Regards,
John Davies |
Re^2: Terminal decline?
by chacham (Prior) on Jun 15, 2015 at 17:37 UTC
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Polls are getting poorer (all the best ones have been done)
After giggling, /me wonders why this is so. Is it that there are not enough suggestions, or that the current pollsters have different tastes. If the vintage of the poll had anything to do with it, there are still plenty of unused poll suggestions from the golden era lying around.
Perhaps this is due to hindsight. If more people reply to a poll, it is retroactively a good poll because it promoted a good (interesting or fun) discussion. For example, In this poll, I. The more serious polls, perhaps, even have less replies.
Personally, i think the quality of the poll is not as important as how often it is changed. Keep it fresh.
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That took way too long to put together. :)
Nice!
Now it was easy for me to port to postgres (and it had to be 9.5devel as only in that (not-yet-released) version does rollup exist).
(From the combination of dual and rollup I think I can conclude you concocted the above SQL on Oracle)
(PostgreSQL 9.5 development is here:
git://git.postgresql.org/git/postgresql.git ((it's pretty stable, always, and especially now that it is in feature-freeze (but NOT(!) for production of course)).
I formatted it a bit to my and postgres' taste and I wrapped the whole thing in some bash tomfoolery to run the three CTE main-selects consecutively:
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Yeah, using Oracle here. The DATE 'YYYY-MM-DD' should be compatible, and the date part extraction was separated into a second CTE, for ease of modification. Although i used Dual, a CTE named Dual can be added on top to include one record and make it all work elsewhere (and in Oracle too.)
ROLLUP is great for reporting or (less frequently) generating records. I tried CUBE, but without a serious study, the month totals seemed better done in the second query, in line. FWIW, i was too lazy to (re-learn and) write a PIVOT query. :)
Unfortunately, i did not have enough polls with rep to check the correlation between rep and posts. Though, that avenue looks promising.
It'd be a lot of fun to write these queries against the actual database. That'd not only remove clerical errors, but be on all the data. By year, by month, and so on.
There is one other effect, perhaps (it's just a guess), worth looking into. That is, if polls are changed often, does that cause subsequent polls to have a higher rating? That is, if they are changed often, people might anticipate them, and thus be more excited when one shows up. That excitement could translate into more posts, or so goes my hypothesis. If true, the quality of the poll would be of lesser significance than the frequency, vis-a-vis the popularity of a poll.
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Re^2: Terminal decline?
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jun 12, 2015 at 15:03 UTC
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Unfortunately, I think your memory is wrong. From a (quick) survey of http://perlmonks.com/?node_id=3989;BIT=reaped%20spam;Wi;M, the period of high spam was 2013 & 2014; which means the stats for those years are highly inflated.
Glad they are gone, but it make the overall decline worse.
As for 'deterioration':
Whilst quantity certainly isn't everything; and I agree that for the most part, the questions these days are better asked and answered; the interesting questions, good debates -- ie. learning opportunities for the more experienced among us -- are few and far between. And getting fewer.
And, whilst I have no statistics to back this up; my gut feel is that the turnover of actively contributing monk's is higher and growing.
Interesting questions occasionally draw out contributions from the more experienced monk's that attend regularly but don't often post. And those questions are usually the one's that have little or no direct Perl content.
If people felt more comfortable posting those types of questions; maybe it would draw them out more often.
And as the wealth of knowledge here is so deep; maybe that would attract more questions and more newbies to the site. If more people were visiting; then maybe they would also look at the Perl questions and be attracted to the language.
For me, the saddest part of the last few days, is the prevalence of belligerent complacency.
With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
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I've updated my OP to reflect the correct dates & the fact that you remembered a spam peak that I hadn't noticed or had forgotten.
Yes, I too notice that many of the highest ranked monks don't come here nearly as often as formerly. I know that Davorg's reason is the security breach, but I have no knowledge of others. But there seem to be people like Athanasius moving up the rankings to take their places.
I don't notice anyone trying to make OT posters feel unwelcome. I've found your algorithmic questions a source of fascination and the only time I've posted OT, I found the replies informative and courteous. I have noticed that some people are more concerned than others about posts being flagged OT, but nothing more than that.
I suspect the "belligerent complacency" you mention may relate to the subject of whether an OT section would help. From the fact that I haven't posted in that thread, it's safe to assume that I don't care much either way. I think we could do more to encourage questions on this site, but I'm unconvinced that an OT section would make a noticeable difference. The raised hackles remind me of the narcissism of small differences, a greater cause of concern to me than many other things.
Regards,
John Davies
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Re^2: Terminal decline?
by Solo (Deacon) on Jun 19, 2015 at 20:00 UTC
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Stack overflow
Totally this. StackOverflow is the place to go for answers to programming questions nowadays, even in Perl.
I'm courting the downvotes, but does it matter? Even as I reply to this I'm going through the cycles of remembering what a pain in the ass it is to post to PerlMonks. Preview, WTF?! Oh, FFS right... I have to use html paragraph marks here...
Who mourns the ongoing fall of Sourceforge, when there's GitHub, GitLab, and all the other superior options? Anyone still using PerlMonks all the time is enjoying nostalgia, suffering from inertia, or both.
So, I agree with BrowserUK's call to action to the extent that PerlMonks is past its prime. OTOH, I also agree with some of the other comments that it doesn't matter if you're getting what you want out of it. For getting stuff done, there's IRC, mailing lists/Google groups, GitHub, Metacpan, and StackOverflow.
Just my $0.02.
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Your 2¢ would have been modded off-topic and closed on SO, you know… For all its pleasant, if buggy and sometimes awful (centenarians are not allowed; markdown is actually a terrible markup; leaving a page without pressing enter used to submit comments automatically; downvoting comments should be allowed), API it is the most joyless, chalkboard scratching forum I have ever seen; its culture is dreadful and aggressively, dogmatically uncreative. 90% of the good Perl answers there are from three locals and monks who participate in both.
The good parts of its API could be adopted here and even improved. I’m on board as a dev if that choice is made.
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Your 2¢ would have been modded off-topic and closed on SO, you know… You know they have a "meta" sections just like pmdscuss
its culture is dreadful and aggressively, dogmatically uncreative.
Its amazing how its blind leading the blind -- have a question about the guidelines/rules? good luck finding the answer
You can see members in the top %1 percent, users for many years, logs in every day , have editor powers... but don't understand the stated purpose of comments
more interested in aggressive pedantry and browbeating and the one true answer
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Whoops... forgot to hit the button to submit the votes I just toggled... well I'm not clicking all those radios again.
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